The Headlines
EPIC, UNIQUE, OLYMPIC. After giving his blood, sweat, and tears for 18 months, Thomas Jolly, the inventive director of Paris’s Olympics opening ceremony, the primary one to not happen in a closed stadium, will be proud. His intention was to seize France in all its range, and it was broadly applauded in France . The extravagant four-hour present, impressed by a 4.5-mile stretch of the River Seine, was divided into 12 tableaux, juxtaposing custom and modernity. One scene, with a bunch of drag queens sitting alongside a trend catwalk in a configuration that appeared to imitate Leonardo da Vinci’s Final Supper, has given rise to some controversy. Mike Johnson, a Republican who serves as america’s Speaker of the Home, known as the scene “surprising and insulting,” and French Bishops’ Convention deplored “scenes of derision and mockery of Christianity.” However typically, the reception was optimistic. The Los Angeles Occasions known as the occasion a “distinctive opening ceremony within the historical past of the Olympic Video games.”
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SCARFACE. The Baroque sculptor Bernini was 40 when he determined to immortalize the options of his 23-year-old mistress Costanza Piccolomini. The couple’s affair was wild and intemperate. For simply months after lovingly carving Costanza’s bust in marble, Bernini caught wind of her sleeping together with his youthful brother Luigi, and ordered one among his servants to slash her face with a knife. That is the surprising story that Rachel Blackmore writes about in her upcoming e-book, as a result of be launched on August 1. Blackmore began digging into Constanza’s previous, after listening to the presenters of a documentary make a passing comment about her disfigurement by Bernini. “I needed to free Costanza from the male gaze which has clouded our view for the previous 400 years,” she stated. “Writing [her story] was additionally a manner for me to look at the methods by which male coercion and violence are nonetheless used to manage girls right now.”
The Digest
The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York attracted extra native guests final yr than it did previous to the Covid-19 pandemic. Worldwide numbers, then again, are about half their pre-2020 determine, reflecting a broader drop in foreigners visiting the town since that yr. [The Art Newspaper]
The Paisley Artwork Institute’s £1.5 million artwork assortment, with works from the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists, shall be offered off after the group’s relationship with the Paisley Museum, the place the works have been beforehand proven and held in storage, grew to become strained. [Scotsman]
The hills round Vari, 10 miles southeast of Athens, are etched with greater than 2,000 graffiti from the sixth century BCE, some containing photographs of trireme warships, dashing horses, packs of looking canines. A brand new one has been found on a mud monitor main from the costal freeway to a hilltop communication tower. The tiny graffito appears to point out the presence of a misplaced temple on the positioning of the Parthenon. [Artnet]
In accordance with artwork historian and professor Martin Kemp, there isn’t any case for returning the Mona Lisa to Italy, for the reason that portray was noticed in France after Leonardo da Vinci left Florence in 1507. “If we’re to have a measured dialogue of restitution, we have to get the historical past proper,” Kemp writes. [The Art Newspaper]
The Manhattan District Legal professional’s Workplace has introduced the restitution of a 1918 Egon Schiele work to its rightful house owners. The Nazi-looted drawing had been within the possession of an Austrian Jewish household, which lately grew to become suspicious of the its provenance. [The Art Newspaper]
The Kicker
RISING AND FALLING. The pop star Girl Gaga was the primary musical act of Friday’s memorable Olympics opening ceremony in Paris. Gaga took to a specifically constructed stage on the financial institution of the River Seine to carry out Zizi Jeanmaire’s cult track “Mon Truc en Plumes.” She appeared to expertise some sound points that, in keeping with followers fast to react on social media, have been marring her efficiency. Some even known as her accent “French-adjacent.” On X, she rebutted her detractors, writing, “I studied French choreography that put a contemporary twist on a French traditional. I rehearsed tirelessly to check a joyful French dance, brushing up on some previous expertise.” [Deadline]